Essay

From “Self-Reliance”

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance;

that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the

wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil

bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in

nature, and none but he knows what he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. . . .

2. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a

joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each

shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

3. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not

be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but

the integrity of your own mind. . . .

4. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers

and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself

with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what

tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.” Ah, so you shall

be sure to be misunderstood.” Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythogoras was misunderstood,

and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and

wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. . . .

5. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but

lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fi ne Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the

hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so, being sure of the information when he

wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the

equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His

notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number

of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not

lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor

of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom, where is the Christian?

Bestowed (v.): presented as a gift or an honor Aversion (n.): strong feeling of dislike

Hobgoblin (n.): something causing superstitious fear Encumber (v.): to impede or hinder

Essay

“Where I Lived and What I Lived For”

from Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

1. When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there,

which by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished

for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the walls being of

rough, weather-stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at night. The upright white hewn

studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the

morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum

would exude from them.

2. I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord

and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and

about two miles south of our only field known to fame, Concord Battle Ground; but I was so low in the

woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant

horizon.

3. Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say

innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshiper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up

early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They

say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: “Renew

thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.” I can understand that. Morning

brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible

and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and

windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer’s requiem; itself an

Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical

about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The

morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least

somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the

day and night.

Saturated (adj.): soaked, full to capacity. Exude (v.): to ooze or spread in all directions.

Lincoln: small town in Massachusetts between Concord and Sudbury.

Concord Battle Ground: reference to Emerson’s poem “Concord Hymn.” Aurora: Greek goddess of dawn.

Requiem (n.): a mass or a solemn ceremony for a deceased person.

Wrath and wanderings: Homer’s Iliad concerns the “wrath” of Achilles and the Odyssey tells of the “wanderings” of Odysseus.

Somnolence (n.): sleepiness, drowsiness.

After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated

each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say,

transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with

the morning.” Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from

such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at

sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual

morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am

awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the eff ort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give

so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators.

If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions

are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual

exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have

never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

4. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite

expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more

encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It

is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects

beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through

which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most

elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the

oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

5. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not

lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation,

unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so

sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to

drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get

the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to

know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it

appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have

somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him

forever.”

Vedas: collection of sacred Hindu literature.

Memnon: In Greek mythology, the King of the Ethiopians whom Zeus made immortal. Memnon’s statue at Thebes was supposed to emit musical notes at dawn.

Spartanlike: The inhabitants of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta were famed for their courage, discipline, and frugality

Sublime (adj.): elevated or loft y in thought or language

“glorify. . .forever”: From the Presbyterian book of beliefs: Westminister Shorter Catechism

6. Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.

7. For my part, I could easily do without the post office. I think that there are very few important

communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in

my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny post is, commonly, an

institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely

offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in the newspaper. If we read of

one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or

one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one

lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are

acquainted with the principle, what do you care for myriad instances and applications? To a

philosopher all news as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their

tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of

the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass

belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure—news which I seriously think a ready wit

might write a twelvemonth, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy. . . .

Evitable (adj.): avoidable

Dead reckoning (n.): nautical term for a method of positioning a ship without using the more reliable method of astronomical observation

German Confederacy: in 1815, the first ineffective alliance of German territories

Sleepers (n.): wooden beams to which railway tracks are riveted

8. Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would

steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such

things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected

only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When

we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and

absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is

always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by

shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on

purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than

men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. . . .

9. Time is but the stream I go-a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and

detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in

the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the

alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a

cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my

hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My

instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and

forepaws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein

is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to

mine.

Poetry Poetry

In the Depths of Solitude A Light Exists in Spring

by Tupac Shakur by Emily Dickinson

I exist in the depths of solitude A Light exists in Spring

Pondering my true goal Not present on the Year

Trying to find peace of mind At any other period -

And still preserve my soul When March is scarcely here

5 Constantly yearning to be accepted 5 A Color stands abroad

And from all receive respect On Solitary Fields

Never compromising but sometimes risky That Science cannot overtake

And that is my only regret But Human Nature feels

A young heart with an old soul It walts upon the Lawn,

10 How can there be peace 10 It shows the furthest Tree

How can I be in the depths of solitude Upon the furthest Slope you know

When there are two inside of me It almost speaks to you.

This Duo within me causes Then as Horizons step

The perfect opportunity Or Noons report away

15 To learn and live twice as fast 15 Without the Formula of sound

As those who accept simplicity. It passes and we stay -

A quality of loss

Affecting our Content

As Trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a Sacrament.

Poetry

Remember

by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her

in a bar once in Iowa City.

5 Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the

strongest point of time. Remember sundown

and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled

to give you form and breath. You are evidence of

10 her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:

red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth

brown earth, we are earth.

15 Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their

tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,

listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the

origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war

20 dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.

Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember that language comes from this.

25 Remember the dance that language is, that life is.

Remember.

Credo from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (Nonfinction)

by Robert Fulghum

1. Each spring, for many years, I have set myself the task of writing a personal statement of belief: a Credo. When I was younger, the statement ran for many pages, trying to cover every base, with no loose ends. It sounded like a Supreme Court brief, as if words could resolve all conflicts about the meaning of existence.

2. The Credo has grown shorter in recent years—sometimes cynical, sometimes comical, sometimes bland—but I keep working at it. Recently I set out to get the statement of personal belief down to one page in simple terms, fully understanding the naïve idealism that implied. . .

3. I realized then that I already know most of what’s necessary to live a meaningful life—that it isn’t all that complicated. I know it. And have known it for a long, long time. Living it—well, that’s another matter, yes? Here’s my Credo:

4. All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don’t hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess!

Don’t take things that aren’t yours.

Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup—they all die. So do we.

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned—the biggest word of all—LOOK.

5. . . .Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Biography

From Into the Wild

by Jon Krakauer

AUTHOR’S NOTE 1. In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked

alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.

2. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and had been an elite athlete.

3. Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990,

McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four

thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all

the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged

margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. His

family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.

4. Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word-article, which ran in the January 1993

issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long aft er that issue of Outside

was replaced on the newsstands by more current journalistic fare. I was haunted by the particulars of

the boy’s starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own.

Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his

death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on

obsession. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as

well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young

men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The

result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.

5. I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that

made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried—

and largely succeeded, I think—to minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I

interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the

hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.

6. He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not

mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless

particularly admired how the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander

among the destitute. In college McCandless began emulating Tolstoy’s asceticism and moral rigor to a

degree that first astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to him. When the boy headed off

into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey;

peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is what he

found, in abundance.

7. For most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than held his own. Indeed,

were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in

August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April. Instead, his innocent mistakes

turned out to be pivotal and irreversible, his name became the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his

bewildered family was left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love.

8. A surprising number of people have been affected by the story of Chris McCandless’s life and death.

In the weeks and months following the publication of the article in Outside, it generated more mail

than any other article in the magazine’s history. This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected

sharply divergent points of view: some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble

ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of

arrogance and stupidity—and was undeserving of the considerable media attention he received. My

convictions should be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his or her own

opinion of Chris McCandless.

Jon Krakauer, Seattle

From Into the Wild (Biography)

by John Krakauer

1. My suspicion that McCandless’s death was unplanned, that is was a terrible accident, comes from reading those few documents he left behind and from listening to the men and women who spent time with him over the final year of his life. But my sense of Chris McCandless’s intentions comes, too, from a more personal perspective.

2. As a youth, I am told, I was willful, self-absorbed, intermittently reckless, moody. I disappointed my father in the usual ways. Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked hurt and hunger to please. If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing.

3. I devoted most of my waking hours to fantasizing about, and then undertaking, ascents of remote mountains in Alaska and Canada—obscure spires, steep and frightening, that nobody in the world beyond a handful of climbing geeks had ever heard of. Some good actually came of this. By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in a brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.

4. In 1977, while brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking happily at my existential scabs, I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devil’s Thumb. An intrusion of diorite scripted by ancient glaciers into a peak of immense and spectacular proportions, the Thumb is especially imposing from the north: Its great north wall, which had never been climbed, rises sheer and clean for six thousand feet from the glacier at its base, twice the height of Yosemite’s El Capitan. I would go to Alaska, ski inland from the sea across thirty miles of glacial ice, and ascend this mighty nordwand. I decided, moreover, to do it alone.

5. I was twenty-three, a year younger than Chris McCandless when he walked into the Alaska bush. My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scattershot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzsche, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards, the latter a deeply troubled writer and psychiatrist who, before putting an end to his life with a cyanide capsule in 1958, had been one of the preeminent British rock climbers of the day. Edwards regarded climbing as a “psycho-neurotic tendency”; he climbed not for sport but to find refuge from the inner torment that framed his existence.

6. As I formulated my plan to climb the Thumb, I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.

7. I owned a book in which there was a photograph of the Devils Thumb, a black-and-white image taken by an eminent glaciologist named Maynard Miller. In Miller’s aerial photo the mountain looked particularly sinister: a huge fi n of exfoliated stone, dark and smeared with ice. The picture held an almost pornographic fascination for me. How would it feel, I wondered, to be balanced on that bladelike summit ridge, worrying over the storm clouds building in the distance, hunched against the wind and dunning cold, contemplating the drop on either side? Could a person keep a lid on his terror long enough to reach the top and get back down. . . .

8. All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious eff ort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to

rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

9. By and by your attention become so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your eff orts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable poison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

10. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn’t the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive. Late in the day on the north face of the Thumb, I felt the glue disintegrating with a swing of an ax.

11. I’d gained nearly seven hundred feet of altitude since stepping off the hanging glacier, all of it on crampon front points and the pick of my axes. The ribbon of frozen meltwater had ended three hundred feet up and was followed by a crumbly armor of frost feathers. Though just barely substantial enough to support body weight, the rime was plastered over the rock to a thickness of two or three feet, so I kept plugging upward. The wall, however, had been growing imperceptibly steeper, and as it did so, the frost feathers became thinner. I’d fallen into a slow, hypnotic rhythm—swing, swing; kick, kick; swing, swing; kick, kick—when my left ice ax slammed into a slab of diorite a few inches beneath the rime.

12. I tried left, then right, but kept striking rock. The frost feathers holding me up, it became apparent, were maybe five inches thick and had the structural integrity of stale corn bread. Below was thirty-seven hundred feet of air, and I was balanced on a house of cards. The sour taste of panic rose in my throat. My eyesight blurred, I began to hyperventilate, my calves started to shake. I shuffled a few feet farther to the right, hoping to find thicker ice, but managed only to bend an ice ax on the rock . . .

13. Awkwardly, stiff with fear, I started working my way back down. The rime gradually thickened. After descending about eighty feet, I got back on reasonably solid ground. I stopped for a long time to let my nerves settle, then leaned back from my tools and stared up at the face above, searching for a hint of solid ice, for some variation in the underlying rock strata, for anything that would allow passage over the frosted slabs. I looked until my neck ached, but nothing appeared. The climb was over. The only place to go was down.

14. Less than a month after sitting on the summit of the Thumb, I was back in Boulder, nailing up siding on the Spruce Street Townhouses, the same condos I’d been framing when I left for Alaska. I got a raise, to four bucks an hour, and at the end of the summer moved out of the job-site trailer to a cheap studio apartment west of the downtown mall.

15. It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. When I decided to go to Alaska that April, like Chris McCandless, I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-riddled logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell the tale.

16. As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals. But I believe we were similarly affected by the skewed relationships we had with our fathers. And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.

17. The fact that I survived my Alaska adventure and McCandless did not survive his was largely a matter of chance; had I not returned from the Stikine Ice Cap in 1977, people would have been quick to say of me—as they now say of him—that I had a death wish. Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly, but I wasn’t suicidal.

Essay

A View From Mount Ritter

Two weeks in the Sierras changed my attitude toward life and what it takes to succeed.

by Joseph T. O’Connor

1. “I hate this,” I thought. We were on our way to the top of Mount Ritter in northeastern California. You would think everyone, near one of the tallest ridges in the Sierra Nevadas, would be in high spirits. But on this particular day the rain fell in torrents. Quarter-size hailstones pelted our protective helmets as thunder echoed through the canyons.

2. It was the second week of my mountain expedition in California. The first week there had not been a cloud in the sky, but on Tuesday of week two, a dark cover crept in from the west, painting the sunlit, blue sky black. The storm came in so fast we didn’t even notice it until our shadows suddenly disappeared.

3. “Here it comes,” our guide warned. As if God himself had given the order, the heavens opened, just a crack. Huge drops began falling but abruptly stopped, as if to say, “You know what’s coming, here’s a taste.” As we began searching for shelter, a bolt of lightning ripped open the blackish clouds overhead and in unison thunder cracked, leaving everyone’s ears ringing. We were in the midst of a huge July thunderstorm. Ethan, our guide, had said that during the summer in the high Sierras it might rain twice, but when it does, it’s best not to be there. Suddenly lightning struck a tree not 20 feet from where I was standing.

4. “Lightning positions!” Ethan yelled frantically. A little too frantically for my taste. I thought he was used to this kind of thing. As scared as I was, squatting in a giant puddle of water and hailstones, with forks of lightning bouncing off the canyon walls around me, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself at the sight of Ethan’s dinner-plate-sized eyeballs as he panicked like an amateur. Soon after the lightning died down some, we hiked to the shelter of nearby redwoods and put on rain gear. While we prayed for the rain to subside, I watched the stream we stood beside grow into a raging, white-water river. Another expeditioner, Mike, and I were under a full redwood donning our not-so-waterproof equipment when I realized we were standing on a small island.

5. “Mike! Let’s go!” I yelled, my exclamation nearly drowned out by the roar of water surrounding us and another roll of thunder.

6. “I’m way ahead o’ ya!” he screamed in his thick New York accent, and his goofy smile broke through the torrents. “Ya ready?”

7. “Yeah!” I yelled back, and jumped from our island into the knee-deep water. He followed as we slopped through the storm, losing our footing every few feet.

8. The unforgiving downpour lasted all day and into the night as we stumbled down the rocky cliffs seeking the driest place to set up camp. It was dusk before we found a small clearing in a pine forest, and began what was to be the worst night of my life. We constructed our tents in the dark, fumbling with the ropes with our frozen hands and finishing just as a stiff ness like rigor mortis set in. We lay all night, shivering in our wet sleeping bags while rain poured down and a small stream made its way through our tent.

9. It’s funny how these memories keep coming back to me as if it was just yesterday. All this happened last summer, after my junior year in high school. I had decided to attend a mountaineering program in the Sierras. Two weeks in the back country with no sign of civilization. It sounded exciting and slightly dangerous, and I’ve always been up for a good adventure. I found out on that trip that nature is underestimated. The experience was the most invigorating, fulfilling, stimulating two weeks of my life. For the first time since I could remember, my head was crystal clear. I felt born again, only 2 weeks old. On top of Mount Ritter, 13,000 feet above sea level, I was entranced at the sight of the orange-red sun as it peeked over the glistening peaks far off in the east. Cumulus clouds appeared transparent as they glowed bright red in the morning glory.

10. The wonder of all I’d experienced made me think seriously about what comes next. “Life after high school,” I said to myself. “Uh-oh.” What had I been doing for the last three years? I was so caught up in defying the advice of my parents and teachers to study and play by the rules that I hadn’t considered the effects my actions would have on me.

11. “Youth is wholly experimental,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. Sure, there will be mistakes, but there will also be successes. I was a confused kid. Everyone—my parents, teacher and coaches—offered suggestions, but I chose to ignore them. I had “potential,” they told me. As a typical teen, I thought I could make it on my own.

12. I didn’t want any help, and the more people tried to give it the more distant I grew.

13. I was the kid who thought he could be perfect at anything without any preparation.

14. I was lost in the daydream that I didn’t need to study; I was going to play professional soccer. My game was good and I thought that practice, or getting good grades, for that matter, was unnecessary. Stubbornness and rebellion can be terrible things if they get out of control.

15. “To get back one’s youth one has merely to repeat one’s follies.” A day before my awakening on

that fateful July sunrise, I would have disagreed with this quotation from Oscar Wilde. But after recognizing the results of my own follies for the first time, I thoroughly agree.

16. This year, my final year in high school, I’ve at last cleared my head and buckled down. Judging by the past semester, I’m on the right track. My D average has U-turned into this report card’s three B’s and one A, landing me on my first Honor Roll. I intend to be on the Principal’s List after this semester; then I hope to graduate and attend a community college in northern California, near the mountains, before transferring to a four-year school.

17. Thanks to that morning’s conversion, I am a new person. Now, I know I’ll have to work hard. The sun streaming over the eastern Sierras wiped out the dark clouds that blurred my vision. Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” must have felt exactly the same way when he wrote in his journal: “No man knows ’till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.”

Biographical Sketch

Sparky

by Earl Nightingale

1. For Sparky, school was all but impossible. He failed every subject in the eighth grade. He flunked physics in high school, getting a grade of zero. Sparky also flunked Latin, algebra, and English. He didn’t do much better in sports. Although he did manage to make the school’s golf team, he promptly lost the only important match of the season. There was a consolation match; he lost that, too.

2. Throughout his youth Sparky was awkward socially. He was not actually disliked by the other students; no one cared that much. He was astonished if a classmate ever said hello to him outside of school hours. There’s no way to tell how he might have done at dating. Sparky never once asked a girl to go out in high school. He was too afraid of being turned down.

3. Sparky was a loser. He, his classmates. . .everyone knew it. So he rolled with it. Sparky had made up his mind early in life that if things were meant to work out, they would. Otherwise he would content himself with what appeared to be his inevitable mediocrity.

4. However, one thing was important to Sparky—drawing. He was proud of his artwork. Of course, no one else appreciated it. In his senior year of high school, he submitted some cartoons to the editors of the yearbook. The cartoons were turned down. Despite the particular rejection, Sparky was so convinced of his ability that he decided to become a professional artist.

5. After completing high school, he wrote a letter to Walt Disney Studios. He was told to send some samples of his artwork, and the subject for a cartoon was suggested. Sparky drew the proposed cartoon. He spent a great deal of time on it and on all the other drawings he submitted.

6. Finally, the reply came from Disney Studios. He had been rejected once again. Another loss for the loser.

7. So Sparky decided to write his own autobiography in cartoons. He described his childhood self—a little boy loser and chronic underachiever. The cartoon character would soon become famous worldwide. For Sparky, the boy who had such lack of success in school and whose work was rejected again and again was Charles Schulz. He created the “Peanuts” comic strip and the little cartoon character whose kite would never fly and who never succeeded in kicking a football, Charlie Brown.

Article

CHARLES M. SCHULZ Biography

from Notable Biographies

Born: November 26, 1922 Minneapolis, Minnesota

Died: February 12, 2000 Santa Rosa, California

American Cartoonist

Cartoonist and creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz was the winner of two Reuben, two Peabody, and five Emmy awards and a member of the Cartoonist Hall of Fame.

Early life

1. Charles Monroe Schulz was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 26, 1922, the son of Carl and Dena Halverson Schulz. His father was a barber. Charles loved to read the comics section of the newspaper with his father and was given the nickname “Sparky” after Sparkplug, the horse in the Barney Google comic strip. He began to draw pictures of his favorite cartoon characters at age six. At school in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was bright and allowed to skip two grades, which made him often the smallest in his class. Noting his interest in drawing, his mother encouraged him to take a correspondence course (in which lessons and exercises are mailed to students and then returned when completed) from Art Instruction, Inc., in Minneapolis after he graduated from high school.

2. During World War II (1939–45; a war fought between the Axis: Italy, Japan, and Germany—and the Allies: France, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States), Schulz was drafted into the army and sent to Europe, rising to the rank of sergeant. After the war he returned to Minnesota as a young man with strong Christian beliefs. For a while he worked part-time for a Catholic magazine and taught for Art Instruction, Inc. Some of his work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and eventually he created a cartoon entitled Li’l Folks for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Creates “Peanuts”

3. In 1950 the United Feature Syndicate of New York decided to publish Schulz’s new comic strip, which he had wanted to call Li’l Folks but which was named Peanuts by the company. In 1950 the cartoon began appearing in seven newspapers with the characters Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, and Snoopy. Within a year the strip appeared in thirty-five papers, and by 1956 it was in over a hundred. The Peanuts cartoons were centered on the simple and touching figures of a boy, Charlie Brown, and his dog, Snoopy, and their family and school friends. Adults were never seen, only hinted at, and the action involved ordinary, everyday happenings.

4. Charlie Brown had a round head with half-circles for ears and nose, dots for eyes, and a line for a mouth. Things always seemed to go wrong for him, and he was often puzzled by the problems that life and his peers dealt out to him: the crabbiness of Lucy; the unanswerable questions of Linus, a young intellectual with a security blanket; the self-absorption of Schroeder the musician; the teasing of his schoolmates; and the behavior of Snoopy, the floppy-eared dog with the wild imagination, who sees himself as a fighter pilot trying to shoot down the Red Baron (based on a famous German pilot during World War I) when he is not running a “Beagle Scout” troop consisting of the bird, Woodstock, and his friends.

5. Charlie Brown’s inability to cope with the constant disappointments in life, the failure and renewal of trust (such as Lucy’s tricking him every time he tries to kick the football), and his touching eff orts to accept what happens as deserved were traits shared to a lesser degree by the other characters. Even crabby Lucy

cannot interest Schroeder or understand baseball; Linus is puzzled by life’s mysteries and the refusal of the “Great Pumpkin” to show up on Halloween. The odd elements and defects of humanity in general were reflected by Schulz’s gentle humor, which made the cartoon appealing to the public.

6. Schulz insisted that he was not trying to send any moral and religious messages in Peanuts. However, even to the casual reader Peanuts offered lessons to be learned. Schulz employed everyday humor to make a point, but usually it was the intellectual comment that carries the charge, even if it was only “Good Grief!” Grief was the human condition, but it was good when it taught us something about ourselves and was lightened by laughter.

Huge success

7. As the strip became more popular, new characters were added, including Sally, Charlie Brown’s sister; Rerun, Lucy’s brother; Peppermint Patty; Marcie; Franklin; José Peterson; Pigpen; Snoopy’s brother, Spike; and the bird, Woodstock. Schulz received the Reuben award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1955 and 1964.

8. By this time Schulz was famous across the world. Peanuts appeared in over twenty-three hundred newspapers. The cartoon branched out into television, and in 1965 the classic special A Charlie Brown Christmas won Peabody and Emmy awards. Many more television specials and Emmys were to follow. An off -Broadway stage production, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, was created in 1967 and ran for four years (it was also revived in 1999). Many volumes of Schulz’s work were published in at least nineteen languages, and the success of Peanuts inspired clothes, stationery, toys, games, and other merchandise. Schulz also wrote a book, Why, Charlie Brown, Why? (which became a CBS television special) to help children understand the subject of cancer (his mother had died of cancer in 1943).

9. Besides the previously mentioned awards, Schulz received the Yale Humor Award, 1956; School Bell Award, National Education Association, 1960; and honorary degrees from Anderson College, 1963, and St. Mary’s College of California, 1969. A “Charles M. Schulz Award” honoring comic artists was created by the United Feature Syndicate in 1980.

Later years

10. The year 1990 marked the fortieth anniversary of Peanuts. An exhibit at the Louvre, in Paris, France, called “Snoopy in Fashion,” featured three hundred Snoopy dolls dressed in fashions created by more than fifteen world-famous designers. It later traveled to the United States. Also in 1990, the Smithsonian Institution featured an exhibit titled, “This Is Your Childhood, Charlie Brown . . . Children in American Culture, 1945–1970.” By the late 1990s Peanuts ran in over two thousand newspapers throughout the world every day.

11. Schulz was diagnosed with cancer in November 1999 after the disease was discovered during an unrelated operation. He announced in December 1999 that he would retire in the year 2000, the day after the final Peanuts strip. Schulz died on February 12, 2000, one day before his farewell strip was to be in newspapers. Schulz was twice married, to Joyce Halverson in 1949 (divorced 1972) and to Jean Clyde in 1973. He had five children by his first marriage.

12. In March 2000 the Board of Supervisors of Sonoma County, California, passed a resolution to rename Sonoma County Airport after Schulz. In June 2000 plans were announced for bronze sculptures of eleven Peanuts characters to be placed on the St. Paul riverfront. That same month President Bill Clinton (1946–) signed a bill giving Schulz the Congressional Gold Medal. In 2002 an exhibition entitled “Speak Softly and Carry a Beagle: The Art of Charles Schulz” was held at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Also in 2002, it was announced that the proposed Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, would be completed in August 2003.